


Home is Where the Nate Is

by TigStripe



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Belonging, Friendship, Gen, Implied Steelatom, Longing, Platonic Love, Time Bureau Nate, friendly fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-30
Updated: 2018-11-30
Packaged: 2019-09-02 17:23:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16791385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigStripe/pseuds/TigStripe
Summary: Nate drops by the Waverider for a surprise visit!





	Home is Where the Nate Is

**Author's Note:**

> Don't mind me, just dealing with Nate not being a "Legend" anymore.

**SARA**

“What are you up to, Captain?”

The parlor was empty, aside from Sara’s quiet form seated in one of the armchairs, her eyes glued to a newspaper clipping. Nate was careful as he approached, as she hadn’t reacted to his announcing himself, and _Sara Lance_ was the last person you wanted to sneak up on.

“Sara?” Nate projected a little louder, despite the fact that he felt like he was interrupting something important.

Sara jerked her head up, away from the newspaper clipping, looked in the direction of Nate’s voice. As soon as she spied him, her demeanor lit up like a Christmas tree. She stood up, all smiles, and brought Nate in for a hug.

“Good to see you,” she said as they separated. Nate smiled, but he knew he’d just intruded on something.

“Is that?” he asked, indicating the newspaper clipping.

Sara looked uneasy as she approached a small lockbox on a nearby table. “My dad’s obituary,” she said, placing it in the lockbox and putting her hand on it in what Nate could only view as a personal ritual. “It’s been eight months, but it still feels like yesterday, being in that hospital hallway when I heard the news.”

Nate’s eyes fell to the floor and his weight shifted uncomfortably. “I’m sorry, Sara. I’ll leave you alone.”

“Now, you didn’t come all the way over from the Bureau to leave people alone,” she said with a cocky grin, “what’s on your mind, Nate?”

Nate could tell she was faking the smile, but he also knew she wasn’t the type to cast her problems on others. He smiled. “Honestly? I was just saying hey. Had a day off, and Ava told me you guys were having some downtime, too. Figured I’d see what everyone was up to.”

“That’s real sweet of you, Nate.” Sara had made her way to the drink table on the other side of the parlor and had begun to pour herself some scotch. “I bet everyone will love seeing you.” She offered him a drink, but he declined. She shrugged and downed the scotch in an impressive shot.

“Do me a favor and don’t tell anyone I’m here,” Nate said. “I wanna surprise everyone.”

Sara smiled. “You got it.”

“Anything I need to know before I make my rounds?”

Sara pondered this. “I don’t think so. John already did his stretches today, so you should be good on the Naked Brit front.”

“Yeah,” Nate muttered, distracted by that memory. “Tell me something: does he _always_ use the library for that?”

“It’s different every day,” Sara said as she plopped down in an armchair with another glass of scotch. “I’ve told him to pick a private place, _like his room_ , but at this point, I’m pretty sure he just does it to piss Mick off.”

“Do they not get along?” Nate asked, not even remotely shocked by this news.

“Nope,” Sara laughed. “But they respect each other’s _skills_ , and I think that helps.”

Nate’s smile faltered as he stood awkwardly at the parlor steps, not quite sure where to go first.

“Okay, pal. Get over here,” Sara insisted. “You’re having a drink with me.”

“Aye aye, Captain.” Nate chuckled and poured himself a drink before placing himself in the second armchair.

The two toasted wordlessly, letting the parlor fall into content silence following the clink of their glasses.

  


**ZARI**

Zari was on her third read through of Mick’s most recent rough draft (it often took up to five reads to make sure she didn’t miss any glaring problems) when she heard a knock on her bedroom door.

“Open,” she called from her bed

The door swished open to reveal the handsome mug of one Nate Heywood, his hands in his pockets and a grin on his face.

“Hey, Nate!” Zari said, a grin lighting up her face as he entered the room.

“Hey, Z. How are you holding up?” Nate asked.

“Honestly?” Zari’s eyes were always so shockingly expressive, but they seemed... _dull_ . She sighed. “Things are _weird_ around here now, and I don’t like it.” She sighed. “I miss joking around with my movie buddy.”

“Aw.” Nate put a hand on his chest, feeling the warmth on the outside as warm as what he felt on the inside. “We should totally do a movie night.”

“Yes. We should.” She pointed for emphasis. “ _Groundhog Day_ sound good?” she added with a wink. Nate laughed.

Zari patted the bed next to hear, leading to Nate sitting down next her. “So what’s going on with you?” Zari asked, leaning back and watching Nate’s face carefully.

Nate smiled, but it was incomplete. “I enjoy working with the Bureau, but I do miss you guys a lot. We went through a _lot_ together. It’s hard to not want to be here every day.”

“Then you should come back,” Zari urged, slapping Nate on the arm.

Nate shook his head. “It’s hard to explain, Z, but the time isn’t right. If and when I do come back, you’ll be the _second_ person I tell.”

“Second?”

“Well, third. Maybe fourth. Ava and Hank are pretty high up there, being my bosses.”

“So who’s the other, then?”

Nate just gave her a knowing look and she grinned.

“You’re going to see everyone today?” Zari asked.

“Everyone who will see me,” Nate replied.

“Hm. Well. I don’t want to hold you up, but you can really help me with something,” Zari said thoughtfully. She reached for Mick’s rough draft and waved it at Nate. “Lemme read something to you from this, and tell me if you think it’s too... _brusque_.”

“Brusque?”

“Yeah. A friend wrote this, and I’m checking for theming and tonal problems. Been staring at it for days, though. I could use a fresh set of eyes.”

“Sure, hit me.” Nate pushed himself to a place where he could lean on the wall against the bed, getting comfortable. Zari grinned, opening the rough draft to the page she’d been having issues with.

“Okay. Bear with me, I have to stagger through some pretty atrocious spelling errors.”

Nate just grinned. “Go for it.”

  


**MICK AND CHARLIE**

Nate poked his head into the galley, looking for no one in particular, and was immediately identified.

“Pretty! Get your ass in here!”

“Mick!” Nate approached the table, where Mick and Charlie sat with beers in their hands, as per the usual. Nate sat opposite Charlie, and Mick offered him a beer.

“The hell are you doing here?” Mick asked.

“Just visiting,” Nate said, taking a swig of beer. He coughed. “Oh, god. I forgot how awful fabricator beer is.”

“It’s right swill,” Charlie agreed, taking a long drag from her own bottle. She made a face as she lowered it.

“I should have brought some with me,” Nate said with a chuckle. “So how are you guys holding up? Have you formed an ‘outcasts support group’ yet?”

Charlie gave Mick a concerned look. “I thought that’s what this team was,” she said, her eyes wide. Mick just gave a hearty laugh, which startled Nate.

“You two seem to get along pretty well,” Nate observed.

“Mick the only Legend that shares my need for freedom,” Charlie explained. “I can’t be chained. I _won’t_ be chained again.”

Nate saw the fire in Charlie’s eyes, and it brought a smile to his face. She had a lot of the same expressions Amaya had, but her demeanor was _so different_ , it was hard to even notice she wore her face. Nate was personally quite grateful for that.

“Pretty here was the first one of us to try to mess up Amaya’s timeline,” Mick said, gesturing with his bottle-hand.

Charlie raised an impressed eyebrow. “Is he, now?” She looked over at Nate, a mischievous grin on her face. “And what spurred such foolishness, Pretty?”

Of _course_ she would latch onto the nickname. “I loved Amaya and wanted to find a way for her to be with me outside of her time,” he admitted.

“Ooh, scandal.” Charlie shifted in her seat, excited to hear more. “Are you the one who let all of us out?”

“That was definitely Sara’s idea,” Nate said, leaning back in his chair. “She was the one who came up with the plan to set Mallus free.”

“Malus,” Charlie corrected.

“Dingus,” Mick corrected.

Nate rolled his eyes. “Right. So, Sara made the plan and we set him free, _inadvertently_ opening your prison, too.”

Charlie’s grin went from mischievous to genuine. “And, by the way, I’m grateful to you lot for that.”

Mick stopped mid-swig, his eyes looking around in thought. He looked at Charlie. “Hey. Were there _gods_ in your cell?”

Charlie considered this. “Something close to it, yeah, I guess there were. Why?”

“Any little _fuzzy_ gods?”

“Mick,” Nate warned.

“ _Fuzzy_ gods?” Charlie looked completely at a loss. “Like an animal god?”

“Gideon,” Mick called. “Pull up a picture of Beebo.”

A display near the fabricator flickered on, revealing the innocuous dead-eye stare of a Beebo doll. Charlie looked over at the screen, her eyebrows low and her head slowly tilted to one side. Nate just rubbed his eyes in resignation.

“Yeah, I’ve seen it,” Charlie said, issuing a wide-eyed stare from Nate. “Called itself a god of destruction.”

“The Vikings,” Nate muttered, collapsing onto the table in defeat. Mick gave another loud laugh.

“Is it not a god?” Charlie asked, looking first at Nate’s fallen head, then Mick.

“No,” Nate said, directly into the table.

“It’s a child’s plaything,” Mick said with a smirk.

“It does look a bit ridiculous,” Charlie admitted with a shrug.

“We’re going to have to warn the Bureau to be on the lookout for a rampant Beebo,” Nate muttered. “That is _not_ a conversation I want to have with my dad.”

“Afraid dear ol’ dad won’t understand?” Charlie asked.

“I think I’m more afraid he _will_ understand, after how we broke him into it all.”

Mick snorted. “Didn’t Haircut go have dinner with your family last week?”

She didn’t say anything, but Charlie’s raised eyebrows told Nate how interested she was to hear about this family meal.

“I didn’t think Hank would be there,” Nate said, collapsing onto his arms. “Of course, the world decided I hadn’t been embarrassed enough yet this year, and he got off early.” Nate heard Mick laughing out loud and could feel his face redden.

“Ooh. Sorry, mate.” Charlie reached across the table and gave Nate a pat on the head. “Tough luck.”

Nate looked up with a crestfallen expression. “Got another crappy fabricabeer?”

Mick handed a fresh bottle to the historian. “I got ya covered.”

The second one tasted like crap, too.

  


**CONSTANTINE**

The library was occupied once more by John Constantine as Nate entered its hallowed walls, but at least this time, he was clothed. He sat behind the desk, poring over an enormous tome with several cultish-looking insignias on the open pages as Nate approached.

The warlock felt Nate’s eyes on him and glanced up. “Ah, Nate. What can I do for ya, mate?”

“Just makin’ the rounds,” Nate said, looking around. “I take it you’ve kind of commandeered the library?”

“Either me or Zari,” Constantine replied, returning to his tome. “I study the nasties we encounter, and Zari’s been working on...well, _something_. She’s being awful tight-lipped about it.”

“I bet she’s working on something to do with the ship,” Nate offered. He took a seat across the desk from John. “You adjusting okay to not being alone all the time?”

“I’m still alone,” John muttered, not even bothering look up. “Just because there are people around me doesn’t mean anything, mate.”

“Even Sara?”

John raised an eyebrow at his interrogator. “Sara and I have...well, let’s just say we’re kindred spirits. But she’s all sunshine and ‘magic is cool,’ whereas I’m a realist.”

“Sunshine. Sara.” Nate held back a laugh. “I’m telling you, if you think that about _Sara_ , then she’s forced her way into your life without you even knowing it.”

“No one forces their way into _my_ life, mate,” John said, his voice stern. “If I don’t let anyone close, they won’t get hurt.”

“Ray told me about what you did at the summer camp,” Nate said softly.

John looked up, his eyes not quite so hard as Nate had seen them before. He didn’t focus on anything in particular, and the two of them sat in silence for a moment. John lowered his eyes back to his tome and said, “That’s not fair. Just being around Raymond is enough to lower someone’s walls.”

“Can’t argue there.” Nate looked up and around, noticing a couple of new additions to the library shelves. “Hey, have you guys been storing magical artifacts here, instead of reporting them to the Bureau?” he asked.

“What’s wrong, there, Natey boy? Gonna report us?”

Nate shook his head. “No, just curious.”

“Some of them need better monitoring than you lot can provide,” John explained. “And some of them are just too _useful_ to let the Bureau have.”

“That sounds pretty shady, dude.”

John gave him a mocking smirk. “Well, when _you_ have been to Hell and have seen the things I’ve seen, _you_ can tell _me_ what should be done with potentially dangerous magical artifacts.”

Nate said nothing, but offered an accepting smirk and nod.

This time, the silence didn’t last long. “How do you think this all ends, John?”

“I’m not sure I catch your drift.”

“The fugitives. Is it even possible to contain all of them?”

“Probably not, but that’s why you have me, mate.”

“How many do you think got released?”

John looked up from the tome, unconcerned. “Does it matter? We just keep doin’ it until there aren’t any beasties left, whenever that may be.”

Nate leaned forward before John returned to his book, an excited glimmer in his eye. “I don’t know magic, but what if there was a way to, I dunno, _hex_ the Earth to automatically banish fugitives that appear?”

“I like your ambition,” John said, but he shook his head. “Magic on that level _in the here and now_ would be almost impossible, let alone snagging them throughout history.”

Defeat curled Nate’s lips into a frown and he leaned back. “Could anyone do it?”

John chuckled darkly as he returned to his tome. “A few folks could, I reckon, but we’d be hard pressed to get them to agree to it. Hell, one of them would be considered a fugitive, himself.”

“Huh.”

John shook his head, clearly not getting anything done. He hadn’t turned the page since Nate had entered the library. He closed the tome and shifted it off to the side. “You’re awful bad for concentration, mate.”

“Sorry.” Nate didn’t feel sorry at all.

John shifted in his seat, giving Nate a tired expression, but he smiled. “You want to talk your Rogue, don’t you?”

Nate’s smile was all the answer John needed. The warlock rolled his eyes and sighed, but his smile opened into a real grin. “Fine,” he said, as if it were the biggest imposition in the world, but his face argued with his tone. “Go get your stuff. We’ll see what you can do with it.”

John watched in amusement as Nate jumped up with a cheeky grin, opening a courier portal to the Bureau to fetch his DnD character sheet and books. Aware that Nate left the portal open, John shrunk down in his chair just as Gary walked past the opening. The two shared an awkward wave, but neither said a word.

  


**RAY**

Nate knew he couldn’t sneak into the lab because of the pressurized doors, but he knew there was a good chance Ray wouldn’t hear it. As the door hissed open, Nate dodged through it and snuck up behind a piled-up table in an attempt to hide his presence. Ray was across the lab, fixated on something that Nate couldn’t see from his vantage point. The historian, shoes off, tiptoed from table to table, until he was right next to Ray.

Grinning, Nate stood up straight and raised his arms to surprise his best bro, but a glimpse of what Ray was staring at caused him to stop.

In Ray’s hands was the chest plate with the large circular star emblem from Nate’s Steel outfit. Ray said nothing, wasn’t tinkering with the chest plate at all, but just sat in reserved silence.

Sneaking up on Ray suddenly didn’t feel like the thing to do.

“Ray.” Ray’s form jerked, but he didn’t move to turn around. Nate reached up and put a (hopefully) comforting hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Hey. You okay?”

Nate was pretty sure he heard a sniffle, but Ray just chuckled weakly. “Yeah, I’m okay.” He put the chest plate down on the table in front of him and turned to face Nate, his face a little pink, but his smile as bright as ever.

“What’s wrong, buddy?” It killed Nate to see Ray upset over anything, most of all _him_.

“Just reminiscing,” Ray replied with a shrug. “There’s a lot of memories on this ship; it’s pretty easy to get lost in them.”

Nate leaned forward and pulled Ray, still seated on his stool, into a tight hug. “You _do_ realize that I’m just a pop over to the Bureau away,” Nate said as they pulled apart.

“I know, it’s just not the same.”

Nate looked past Ray and noticed a domed helmet with pointed ears and nose on the table next to his chest piece. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing.

Ray followed Nate’s finger, his eyes landing on Kendra’s old helmet. “Oh!” He laughed as he picked up the helmet and held it up to Nate. “This belonged to an old friend. She was one of the original Legends.”

Nate observed the helmet up close, noting its metalwork more than anything. “Is it...Egyptian?”

“Good eye,” Ray replied. “We never told you the story of why the Legends were put together, did we?”

“They” had not. “Who all is still around from back then?” Nate asked.

“Just me, Sara, and Mick,” Ray replied, his eyes averting to one of the clear lab windows that still had some of Martin’s scribbly equations drawn all over it. “We’ve lost everyone else. Six people, half of them dead.”

Afraid to pry any further, Nate took to examining the helmet, turning it over in his hands several times before handing it back to Ray. “Were you guys all as close as we are?”

A small noise escaped Ray’s throat, but it was accompanied with a shrug. “I was engaged to Kendra. Sara and Leonard seemed like they were pretty good friends. Martin really got on everyone’s nerves more than he helped back then. But we were a loose family back then, and it only got better from there.”

Nate set the helmet back on the table, next to his armor piece. “It sounds difficult. I’m sorry, bro. I didn’t mean to dredge it up.”

“It’s okay. It’s good to look back at where you came from, from time to time.” Ray put a hand on the helmet with a sad smile. “Just like you.”

“You haven’t lost me,” Nate assured him. “I’m not technically a Legend anymore, but I’m still here, aren’t I?”

Something dark flickered across Ray’s face as he looked up at Nate, almost like he was afraid to say anything. “But for how long?”

“Now, just hang on.” Nate put his hands up in a hands off motion, an uncomfortable smirk on his face. “I’m not going anywhere. You can’t get rid of me that easily, Ray Palmer.”

Ray rolled his eyes, but he seemed to have lightened up. “Don’t threaten us.”

Nate grinned and patted Ray’s shoulder. “Hey. Wanna go watch a movie with Zari? She’s evidently been missing having movie night.”

“She should have said something,” Ray said, perking up. “Let’s go, buddy.”

Nate helped Ray off of his stool and, arms around each other’s shoulders, headed off to meet up with Zari.

  


**NATE**

Nate returned to the Bureau full of popcorn and beer, a little buzzed and all sorts of happy. He dodged past Ava, giving her finger guns on the way, and made it to his desk. He took out a small metallic cylinder from his pocket and placed it on his desk, next to the little lamp he used for late night work. Pressing a button on the cylinder, the air above it shimmered as a picture of Nate with all the Legends - Charlie and John included - projected in a hologram.

With his weight on his desk and his head propped up by a hand, Nate stared at the illuminating photograph. He realized his vision was slightly blurry, but he wasn’t sure if he was crying, or just buzzed. He wiped at his eyes, realizing it was the former.

“God, I miss those dorks,” he said through the tears, a sad smile breaching his face. He reached forward and turned off the hologram, prepping to head home.

But even as he made his way to his ride home, the image still persisted close to the front of his mind, the smiles, smirks, and grimaces (in Mick’s case) ingrained in Nate’s memory forever.


End file.
